lifetime of the emperor himself the first beginnings of those legends which afterwards clung to the name of Charlemagne. One can imagine him round-eyed in the churchyard, listening to fabulous stories of Charles’s Iron March to Pavia, such as a gossiping old monk of St. Gall afterwards wrote down in his chronicle. It is likely enough that such legends were the nearest Bodo ever came to seeing the emperor, of whom even the poor serfs who never followed him to court or camp were proud. But Charles was a great traveller; like all the monarchs of the early Middle Ages he spent the time, when he was not warring, in trekking round his kingdom, staying at one of his estates, until he and his household had literally eaten their way through it, and then passing on to another. And sometimes he varied the procedure by paying a visit to the estates of his bishops or nobles, who entertained him royally. It may be that one day he came on a visit to Bodo’s masters and stopped at the big house on his way to Paris, and then Bodo saw him plain; for Charlemagne would come riding along the road in his jerkin of otter skin, and his plain blue cloak (Einhard tells us that he hated grand clothes and on ordinary days dressed like the common people); and after him would come his three sons and his bodyguard, and then his five daughters. Einhard has also told us that He had such care of the upbringing of his sons and daughters that he never dined without them when he was at home and never travelled without them. His sons rode along with him and his daughters followed in the rear. Some of his guards, chosen for this very purpose, watched the end of the line of march where his daughters travelled. They were very beautiful and much beloved by their father, and, therefore, it is strange that he would give them in marriage to no one, either among his own people or of a foreign state. But up to his death he kept them all at home saying he could not forgo their society. Then, with luck, Bodo, quaking at the knees, might even behold a portent new to his experience, the emperor’s elephant. Haroun El Raschid, the great Sultan of the “Arabian Nights” had sent it to Charles, and it accompanied him on all his progresses. Its name was “Abu-Lubabah,” which is an Arabic word and means “the father of intelligence,”[1] and it died a hero’s death on an expedition against the Danes in 810. It is certain that ever afterwards Ermentrude quelled little Gerbert, when he was naughty, with the threat, “Abu-Lubabah will come with his long nose and carry you off.” But Wido, being aged eight and a bread-winner, professed to have felt no fear on being confronted with the elephant; but admitted when pressed, that he greatly preferred Haroun El Raschid’s other present to the emperor, the friend dog, who answered to the name of “Becerillo.”